In choosing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony for his final suite of concerts with the New York Philharmonic (June 24 through June 27), Lorin Maazel doubtless wanted to go out big—and there’s nothing bigger than the Eighth, which employed some one thousand musicians at its world premiere in 1910. But in doing so, he also chose, unwittingly, Read More
January may be a dead time for the movie business, but in New York, at least, classical music snaps back with a vengeance. Last week brought an exceptional head rush, as fond returns and new beginnings crowded the calendar.
At the center of it was Lorin Maazel, who, despite his advanced age—and the critical Read More
Tonight, when Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, lifts his wand to conducts the opening of Wagner’s Walküre, it will be his first appearance at the Met since January 1963 — when he was just 32 years old. That was "when top tickets were $11 instead of $375, Robert F. Wagner Read More
Conducting an orchestra may be the most mysterious profession. All successful maestros must have an acute ear for musical sound, a mastery of the score that finds underlying order among dizzying combinations of notes, and an ability to harness 100 players and lead them toward a common goal. But nobody, as Norman Lebrecht writes in Read More
The chairmen did it. The recent news that the New York Philharmonic’s much-ballyhooed plan to move to Carnegie Hall has gone up in smoke confirmed what I and other skeptics have been saying since the deal was announced (or, more accurately, leaked to The New York Times ) last June: It was never going to Read More
So the New York Philharmonic will get an American conductor after all. And he’s young enough to make Kurt Masur look like his … brother.
Such, at least, seems to be the conclusion of the excruciatingly long public search that has ended with Lorin Maazel, 70 years old and a veteran of Cleveland and Read More
When the New York Philharmonic decided in early 1998 that it would not renew musical director Kurt Masur’s tenure past 2002, it somewhat recklessly entered a nationwide scramble that already had the cities of Cleveland and Philadelphia–and soon Boston–vying to find replacements for their own departing maestros. With the orchestra playing better than it had Read More
